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The Diagnostic Value of Freedom

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Notes

  1. Though see Hayek [23] and Mill’s defense of free speech in chapter 3 of On Liberty, for discussion of the instrumental social benefits of freedom. See also Hurka [25, pp. 142-143] , and Carter [15, chapter 2], for a discussion of its intrinsic value.

  2. Berlin [5]; Nozick [38]; Steiner [50]; Kramer [30]; Bader [3]

  3. Pettit [43]

  4. List & Valentini [35]

  5. Taylor [51, 211-19]; Kristjánsson [32]

  6. Pattanaik, & Xu [39]; Puppe [45, 174-199]; Bervoets and Gravel [6] ; Sen [48]

  7. Carter [15].

  8. See e.g. Dworkin [18]; Kymlicka [33, 145]; Van Hees [53, 116].

  9. Carter [15, 36].

  10. Sen [48]

  11. Arrow [2]

  12. Pattanaik & Xu [40]

  13. Scanlon [47, 242-243].

  14. Scanlon [47, 253]

  15. Rawls [46, 544-5].

  16. Mill [37, chapter III, paragraph 3].

  17. see e.g. Crocker [16, 115] .

  18. Bodner & Prelec [8].

  19. Bovens [9, 228-233], observes that this concept is closely related to how observation is defined in the study of causal networks, e.g. as in Pearl [42].

  20. Taylor [52, 27].

  21. Bradley [12].

  22. Anderson [1, 23].

  23. Bradley [12, 200]

  24. Bradley [12, 207]

  25. Bradley [12, 201].

  26. Representing preference changes in sentential form is a common move in the literature on preference change. See e.g. Hansson [22], and Benthem & Liu [4].

  27. This remark connects naturally with arguments in defense of the desire-as-belief thesis, which states that a rational person desires some proposition to be true just to the extent that she believes or expects it to be good. See Broome [13, 265-267]; Bradley & List [11]; and Bradley & Stefánsson [10], for discussion and defense.

  28. See Karni & Vierø [27], and Bradley [12, chapter 12].

  29. Hill [24].

  30. Formally, let \(\Omega \) be a \(\sigma \)-algebra of defined over a set \({\mathcal {X}}\) of arbitrary elements (i.e. a set of subsets of \({\mathcal {X}}\) closed under complement and countable union and intersection), interpreted as the set of all possible propositions. An individual’s state of awareness at some moment in time is modelled by a subalgebra \(\Omega _{\mathcal {A}}\) with \({\mathcal {A}}\subseteq {\mathcal {X}}\).

  31. Though for an illuminating discussion, see Hansson [22], Bradley [12, chapter 10.6], and Dietrich and List [17].

  32. Keynes [29, 73].

  33. Popper [44].

  34. See e.g. Levi [34]; Gärdenfors & Sahlin [19]; Gilboa & Schmeidler [20]; Binmore [7].

  35. Shimony [49]; Glymour [21].

  36. Loch, Solt, & Bailey [36].

  37. Bradley [12, 255]. There is a project in the field of risk management around putting a probability on the catchall. But the methodology for doing so involves trying to first expand one’s awareness to consider things we hadn’t considered, then try to estimate the probabilities of these new possibilities. See Kim [28].

  38. Formally, let \(\Omega _{{\mathcal {A}},x,A}\) denote the set of all possibilities the agent is aware of after having chosen x from A, given that \(\Omega _{\mathcal {A}}\) was their prior awareness state. Then, \(x\in A\) is more diagnostically valuable than \(y\in B\) along the dimension \({\mathbf {a}}\) of awareness growth if and only if \(|\Omega _{{\mathcal {A}},x,A}|\ge |\Omega _{{\mathcal {A}},y,B}|.\) If \(\Omega \) is infinite, we substitute the measure of the subalgebras for their cardinality.

  39. Paul [41]; Callard [14].

  40. I would like to thank Alex Voorhoeve, Campbell Brown, Sergio Tennenbaum, Bob Sugden, Ralf Bader, and an anonymous reviewer at the Journal of Value Inquiry for their helpful comments. Very Special thanks go out to Richard Bradley, whose help to me was invaluable.

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    Nicolas Côté

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Côté, N. The Diagnostic Value of Freedom. J Value Inquiry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09891-9

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